Thursday, August 25, 2011

New Mac and Rad Studio XE2

Note: I was given permission to blog about the Rad Studio XE2 Beta.

Today my first Mac OSX computer arrived at my home. I have only used a Mac when working
on Sound and Lights at local theatre. I have spent about 10 hours total time working on a Mac in the last 10 years. So I would guess this as close to a new user experience as one my expect.

The primary reason I bought the Mac is because Rad Studio XE2 supports writing applications for this platform. I like to make sure I stay on top of the various Delphi technologies so I had to buy one.

I opened the box and hooked up the various cables. Turned it on and I saw a little diagram asking me to turn on my touch pad or mouse. Well I turned on the touch pad and nothing happened. After trying various combinations I gave up and called support. After having to power of the Mac twice we were able to get the wireless keyboard and mouse to work. Things were not going well, and I was a bit worried I had made a mistake but things turned around.

I had installed the latest Rad Studio XE2 Beta version on my home computer, which is a Windows 7 machine.
Then I performed the following steps:
1. File|New Firemonkey HD Application.
2. I then right Clicked on Target platform and added OSx

I knew I had to install something on the Mac but I did not know where it was or how to do it.
I opened the Help file and found it had a Huge amount of information that pointed me in the right direction.
From the little I did read I was very very pleased with the depth of coverage.

3. I Installed the Platform Assistant on the Mac according to the instructions.
4. I launched the platform assistant clicking on the "paserver.command" in
"Developer" section of finder.

5. Then in back in Delphi, I right clicked on the "OS X" Target Platform and selected "Assign Remote Profile"
6. On the "Select Remote Profile for 'OS X' Platform" dialog I pressed "Add..."
7. I walked through the Wizard and Added Information about my Mac.

8. Then finally I selected the new profile that was created.
9. I then pressed the run button.

The application appeared on the Mac as expected.

I must say the out of the box experience with Delphi and the Mac looks very polished, it was very easy to setup. I spent more time trying to get the wireless mouse and keyboard to work than getting Rad Studio configured and my first App running.

Now that I have a basic app running it's time to really explore how FireMonkey integrates will both Windows and OS X.

8 comments:

Why do I see Delphi people buy Mac's everywhere?What a waste of money.

I have to admit that I'm curious too, and I want to create Mac apps too (for fun mostly). But I just installed VMWare Workstation, and run OSX Lion from there. It works really fast.. you can even turn graphics hardware acceleration on, so everything feels really smooth.

My first impressions:- At first it's annoying that the scroll wheel works in reverse everywhere, but you get used to that quickly.- The middle button is not used anywhere.- To copy/paste, you need to press windows-key+c, and windows-key+v. - The app store doesn´t let you install anything without creating an iTunes account first, and to create such an account, you need to give your credit card details. Really, wtf?- When you have that done, downloading XCode4 takes forever. I've got a 20MBit internet connection, but the app store was downloading at not even 1/10th of that.

But.. maybe the coolest thing was this:My ancient colour laser printer doesn't have drivers for Windows7, but I found drivers for OSX, and now I can print from my virtual machine. That's pretty neat I have to say.

Once XE2 comes out, I'm ready to start playing with the Mac stuff, and see if it's useful or not, without having to buy any Mac hardware.